Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women's Voices

Lizzie Borden Addresses Her Jury of Men

49 Lizzie Borden Addresses Her Jury of Men I needed the prussic acid for my sealskin cape; it was infested. Arsenic in the mutton? There were no signs of poison; I could hear the hymns of flies as those two bodies —airing naked, butchered — awaited autopsy on the dining-room table. (Oh, how she became the fatty beef placed at the spot for her own platter!) Their two stomachs, knotted and sent off, were found pure. I was my father’s favorite; he always wore the pinky ring I gave him, quite like a wedding band in that it bound us. He understood the tether. And she was not my mother — Abby Durfee Gray, his scowling wife — her father was only a tin-peddler with a pushcart of sundries, and she was once an old sallow maid, (like my dear sister Emma). He saved that ancient whale from the dust of aging alone among trinkets — but who would save Emma and me? No, I needed no saving. A woman of wealth, of travel (I’ve seen Lilly Langtry on the stages of Europe!), I was a volunteer in the Ladies’ Fruit and Flower Mission. 50 During the murders? I’d been in the barn, as I’ve stated, searching for metal to fashion sinkers for a fishing trip to come. The barn floor was covered in a layer of dust? My footprints were not there? Let me explain, dear sirs. Look again into my pale, damp face, so like your daughters’, sisters’, wives’. We ladies only know what we are taught. We are your creations: porcelain hands, hearts sublime. We are not real —that’s why there were no footprints in the dust: We float. And my father made me. You all recall my father, the richest man in town: as a young entrepreneur his caskets were the first to come with a money-back guarantee, and, yes, I’ve heard the rumors that he cut off the feet of his dead clients to fit them into smaller, cheaper coffins —and, for that, did he use an axe? ...